A
friend and I were laughing recently about our mutual friend, Hannah,
who always denied that wolves could be in the Czech Republic. But
then she always denied that anything bad could be from the country.
Even if she had a flu it was because you had brought it from England.
Wolves
had been hunted to extinction here in the 19th century,
indeed there is a memorial in the Sumava to the last one. The big bad
wolf of the fairytales was banished to the forests of other
countries. And yet, the memory of wolves lived on in folk memory. I
felt it distinctly in the darkness of the forest I viewed from the
window of that night-bound train in Easter 1990. I felt it as I lay
in a bed piled high with duvets on those freezing nights of my first
stay in the house. As I heard the pad of snow dropping from the
broken roof I thought of wolf padding through the drifts at the rear of the house,
the following day my imaginings were reinforced by fox prints
enlarged by the melting of snow. Maybe that is why the first book I
wrote here was called Mother of Wolves.
The
big bad wolf is now officially back. He was first seen, caught on a
trip-camera near Vyssi Brod barely twenty miles from here. Wild
creatures do not respect lines on maps and once the physical barrier
of the Iron Curtain had been removed it was only a matter of time
before the wolves' wanderings brought them into the Sumava Forest and
beyond. It seems only right that EU freedom of movement should extend
to this beautiful animal, if not in future to Brits.
